German Far-Right Leader Downplays Nazi Era's Impact, Calls it 'Speck of Bird Poop'

One of the leaders of Germany's far-right nationalist party, Alternative for Germany dismissed the Nazi era as a "speck of bird poop" in German history on Saturday, in a comment that drew widespread condemnation online as it seemingly negated the devastating impact of the Nazi-era genocide against Jewish people.   

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The far-right party leader, Alexander Gauland, said, "Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history." Gauland added that Germans must take responsibility for 12 years of rule by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, but argued that it's only a small part of Germany's history.

"We have a glorious history and it, dear friends, lasted longer than those blasted 12 years," he told a gathering of the party's youth movement, according to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Dpa news agency.  

AfD which won 12.6 percent of the vote to enter Germany’s national parliament last year primarily on an anti-immigration and anti-establishment platform, became the third largest party in Germany's parliament after the 2017 election and is also the largest opposition party. 

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the secretary general of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party, said Gauland's comments revealed the true nature of a party hiding behind middle-class respectability. "50 million victims of war, the Holocaust, and total war are just bird poop," Kramp-Karrenbauer said on Twitter. 

Katrin Göring-Eckardt of the Greens party called Gauland's comments a slap in the face to Holocaust survivors and their descendants and said they highlight the need to push back against a hate-filled minority. "Those who say they understand the concerns of AfD voters haven't understood anything," she said. 

Marco Buschmann of the Free Democratic Party said politicians who systematically play down the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust show how bleak their vision for Germany's future is.

Hitler and his party ruled Germany from 1933-1945 and later came to engineer one of the worst recorded genocides in the history of mankind with the extremist nationalism-fueled ethnic cleansing of Jews. Millions of people were persecuted or perished during the Nazi era, including six million Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust.